This is post #6. Every day for the entire duration of the National Poetry Month, I will try to post short write-ups about poetry books that I like. Today, let's take a look at two of Charles Freeland's books. Eucalyptus Publisher: Otoliths Books ISBN-13: 9780980878592 Deviled Ham and a Picture of Jesus: Twenty Grubb Tales Publisher: Finishing Line Press ISBN-10: 1599247410 ISBN-13: 978-1599247410 To buy from Amazon Eros & (Fill in the Blank) Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] ISBN-10: 1935402730 ISBN-13: 978-1935402732 To buy from Amazon Through the Funeral Mountains on a Burro Publisher: Otoliths Books ISBN-10: 0980602521 ISBN-13: 978-0980602524 To buy from Amazon I am enamored of Charles Freeland's unique body of work. There's an air of erudition prevalent in his prose poems, most evident in Furiant, Not Polka (Moria Books, 2008). His chapbooks available online, Eulalie & Squid (Chippens), Chilean Sea Bass is Really Just Patagonian Toothfish (Differentia Press), and The Case of the Danish King Halfdene read as if he was talking about his own made-up world replete with characters which may or may not be misconstrued as metamorphic, and he does not care whether the reader gets it or not. Most days, I only NOT get it; I am also overwhelmed by his blatant disregard for his readers. Charles Freeland has this uniquely irreverent voice, and he invents his own textures, hand-paints his own landscapes just to satisfy his craving (or curiosity or whatever it is that he writes for). I do not see any effort to entertain, to convince, or to horrify. And for that, he has my utmost respect and admiration. Every book is always an experience. But Eucalyptus (a themed book-length prose-poem/flash-fiction collection forthcoming from Otoliths Books) is a different ballgame altogether. It is an immersion, like being indoctrinated into a weird mythology which surprisingly, amidst the chaotic and mostly absurd turn of events, makes sense. I cannot even summarize it. I tried. I started off by breaking it down chronologically, but there’s no time element, no point of reference. Then I looked at the characters: the narrator, Immanuel (who is lost, in all sense of the word), Eulalie, etc., but I cannot quite flesh them out enough to say anything conclusive. The tragic ending does not make sense to me. Even the title of the book confuses me. There’s only one thing that keeps me reading: Eucalyptus is a strong narrative about loneliness. It tells the story of abandonment, of disenchantment, and it is told in a convoluted fashion which forces everything to shine right through. This is probably what Charles Baudelaire was referring to as "the miracle of poetic prose." It says with certainty: These original stories contained no moral. They simply revolved around a creature so loathsome, it decided finally to drown itself. It is invasive: For who wants a soul when the protection of it means you can not give pleasure to others? You can not find your way inside them, except with the hands which are clumsy and too public. They lack the intimacy of the hidden. I do not pretend to understand Eucalytus. It’s not meant to be deciphered. I’m just here for the long haul, the unforgettable ride, the frequent rereading. The Case of the Danish King Halfdene is a journey to a magical nowhere, where the road signs, the danger, and the will to continue are all in the mind. The assertion that: "Navigational skills are not required. Where you are going is the least of your concerns..." sums up the theme of this amazing collection of prose poems. Like a dedication, Freeland writes at the end of the titular piece:
For those afraid they may have stumbled, by accident, into the wrong existence. And will have to stay here... The tone of The Case of the Danish King Halfdene, like most of Freeland's work, contains an underlying assumption that the reader is familiar with the complex backdrop of the mythical elements he drops along the way. In "Very Bad Poetry," one gets a glimpse of Freeland's writing ethos or lack thereof: If we aren’t sure, though, why something behaves the way it does—why the garbage smells like pine trees in the morning, and vice versa, why the giraffe has to bend that way to drink—it’s proper policy to pretend like we understand anyway. In "Not Yet the Sounds of Speech," dark humor shines through: Sometimes it’s better to meditate in the afternoon than whisper to some deity you can’t even be sure wears any clothes... The marvelous "A Disturbance in the Magnetic Field," which is the strongest piece in this collection, "infers" something which the author presupposes would have been obvious to everybody: Every claustrophobic knows, for instance, that walls are, in fact, a wonderful invention. The kind of thing that keeps people from inferring your motives. References to ekphrastic motives in "Twilight of the Big Finish." The piece entitled "Getting Through the Last Pages" is a treatise on hopelessness. "Spring Cleaning in the Labyrinth of the Continuum" is set in a Borges-like wasteland. The last piece, "Why Light Was Invented," questions our interpretations of reality.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
My BooksThe Drone Outside
Black Arcadia Meditations of a Beast Butterfly Dream Age of Blight Lifeboat A Roomful of Machines Grim Series We Bury the Landscape InterviewsBellingham Review
SmokeLong Quarterly Weird Fiction Review The Collagist SmokeLong Quarterly Kitaab SF Signal The Mangozine Carpe Noctem Blog Friends of Chômu Press Her Kind One Writer's Journey Flash Fiction Chronicles JMWW One Buck Horror Every Day is an Adventure Five-Minute Fridays Lisa Haselton's Blog Prick of the Spindle Connotation Press Philistine Press |